Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Twins Are Quite a Handful

This week's prompt for Sepia Saturday 93 is an old photo of a man sleeping in a chair. I decided to show the Happy Dreams of Long Ago postcard because it also shows a man sleeping in a chair. This man is apparently tired out by caring for his babies and is dreaming of his happy carefree courtship days.

At first I thought the man on the postcard was holding twins. However, on closer inspection, it appears that the baby on the left is older than the one on the right. Nevertheless, I decided to continue with the twins theme.

I am not a twin, but I have sisters who are twins. The next photo shows my mother with her twin babies. Originally this photo was Kodacolor, and I was included in the picture. (The original and some variations are shown below). On the back of the photo is a stamp that reads "This is a Kodacolor Print made by Eastman Kodak Company T. M. Regis, U. S. Pat. Off. Week of August 22, 1949."

The next photo shows my uncle (my mother's brother) with his twins. This was originally a black and white photo, labeled Mineral King and dated July 1959. It has the following description on the back: "These were their crawling suits for camping. We sewed sleeves and pants legs closed so they wouldn't get cut and let them crawl in campground."

My grandmother had twins too, but those died in the flu epidemic of 1918. My mother is between those twins in the picture below.

When I was young, I thought it would be nice to have twins. But if I did have twins, I probably would have discovered that "Twins Are Quite a Handful."

Below are some variations of the photo of my mother with my sisters and me.

The original scan turned out much too yellow. The red lipstick was about the only real color left.

The photo actually appeared more like this. I decreased the yellow and increased the magenta using "selective color" on the yellow.

Picture number 1 was converted to grayscale mode.

Picture number 3 was adjusted with levels and edited (mainly with the burn tool).

Picture number 4 was cropped, converted to RGB color mode, and then given the default Photoshop sepia style.

16 comments:

Oh my goodness! I LOVE that postcard. I am sending the link to my niece who also has twins.

I also loved the experiments with an old photo that had discolored. I am working with one right now that is giving me fits. I think perhaps it will take on a new life as a sepia or black-and-white. I always learn something new here at Sepia Saturday!

When the time comes that I can already have babies, I would want twins :D One boy and one girl please. But I think it has to be 'in the family' to have twins. I don't know any relative who are twins, though :(

Thanks for the reminder about them being a handful, but as my three-year old grandchildren twins have just gone home after two weeks here, the scars are still fresh! I’m joking of course. They do tend to run in families. My D-I-L is a twin herself, and my Mum had twins, which died very young. It’s very sad to see that photo of your Mum’s siblings and to know that they died later.

Oh that's too bad about grandmother's twins passing, but what a fine collection of family photos you have. Amazing...twins can be fun...my mother's mother was a twin and they say it skips a generation so I could have had twins or so my mother thought!

Very entertaining. The first post card hardly gives a picture of comfort looks more like he collapsed! Twins. Oh yes, double trouble. I remember saying to my Mom, "I wish I were twins!" she shuddered because there were twins in the family line, but she was glad to have only one of me.This was a fun post. The one of your uncle is hilarious as someone already said.

I had no idea about twins in my family until ours were born - then it turned out there had been others! A handful, yes, but as you can see, some great moments.

I am intrigued by the early Kodacolor print. Kodachrome was first sold for 35mm still cameras in 1936, and Kodacolor negative film in 1942. It seems likely that your photo was taken with something like a Super Kodak Six-20 camera, which used 2¼ x 3¼ inch film.

I loved this post. Always love stories about twins. I had twins that died at birth in 1960 but they came from my husband's side of the family. I was sick when they were born never even got to see them. I just knew they were girls. We had 6 more perfect and beautiful, even to this day. Great job.QMM